Dental restorations or prostheses are often manufactured by use of automated processes. In such automated processes ceramic and/or glass-ceramic materials are often used which also allow for making high-quality dental restorations because of their good physical, aesthetic and biological properties. Typically the manufacturing process for such restorations includes the steps of capturing data representing the shape of a patient's teeth, designing at least part of the dental restoration based on the captured data using computer-aided design (CAD) software, and manufacturing the dental restoration on an automated Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine. An exemplary CNC machine for making dental restorations is available from 3M ESPE AG (Seefeld, Germany) under the trade designation LAVA™ Form Milling Unit.
Machines of this type are designed to automatically machine a dental restoration, parts of a dental restoration or precursors of such. In particular for machines that produce dental restorations from blanks by removing material, for example by milling or grinding, it is desirable that the removed material is, preferably continuously, discharged from the machine to avoid interruptions of the manufacturing for disposing accumulated material. In case of machining ceramic or glass-ceramic material the removed material is also often present in the form of small particles or dust which may be generally undesirable in a manufacturing process because small particles or dust may cause wear on machine parts or contaminate the environment.
Although current machines may provide a variety of advantages, there is still a need for a device and a process which provide maximum reliability and require minimal maintenance efforts. Further such device and process are desirably inexpensive, and provide high quality dental restorations.